Miles Davis

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Stop before you’re done.

When you’re creating your own shit, even the sky ain’t the limit.

In Europe, they like everything you do. The mistakes and everything. That’s a little bit too much.

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later.

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy’s playing blues like we play, he’s in high school. When he starts playing jazz it’s like going on to college, to a school of higher learning.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

You hear about the Duke Ellingtons, the Jimmie Luncefords, and the Fletcher Hendersons, but people sometimes forget that jazz was not only built in the minds of the great ones, but on the backs of the ordinary ones.

Critics get a little carried away with what someone should have done, rather than what he did.

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

Jazz is a living music; since its beginning has expressed the feelings, dreams and hopes of the people.

Jazz has the ability to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man.

Jazz? has no boundaries.

People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.

Jazz is a feeling more than anything else.

Jazz music has become academic. Sometimes that doesn’t feel right to me.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.